Once upon a time

Recently I realized that I'd like to improve my Adobe Flex knowledges but, I can't start coding... how do I do that? I like doing things in the right way, I mean in a formal and systematic way, with the rigor of engineering.... There is a step before... so I decided to start the Flex Development Guide. Well, I like doing things in the right way, but I really enjoy defining the right way in which things should be done.

So, which tasks should be defined in that guide? In which order? I can't start defining the guide... there is also a step before: I need a development process. I think we are on the right way; it could be a great to define:

• A generic, technology independent development process.
• Many development guides, one per technology. Each one would extend the development process to set and define the tasks for a specific technology.

OK, we can't start coding. We may start defining a development guide for a concrete technology, but it should be interesting to start defining a developmet process. So, we can start defining this development process, can't we?? No, we can't! How shall we do that? We need a process modeling language! So, let's start designing it.

If you ask somebody: "how would you start telling a story?" We're sure that he or she would answer "Once upon a time...". But, what about software development? Where do you need to start? Coding? Defining a development guide? A process model? A metamodel?

If you're interested like me in doing things in the right way and defining the right way in which things suold be done, I recomend you to read the paper by Tao Xie "A linguistic Study of Process Modeling Languages". It's an interesting study about process modeling languages paradigms and its features. We'll talk about it in detail soon.

Taking the process modeling concepts and phases in that paper, I'v just started writing a Procedure which intention is to specifiy the steps for process modeling, beginning with the process modeling language definition. You can find it in my personal site, at http://sites.google.com/site/josemartinezbenavides, in the IT > PM section. I hope you to take part!

"And they lived happily ever after."

Today's questions:

• How is your experience in process modeling? What steps did you follow? Did you begin defining the process modeling language?
• What do you think about defining a generic and technology independent development process? What do you know about MDA?
• What are the differences between a business and a development process?